Everything seems oddly idyllic at the start: the hillside dotted with poppies where the grandfather tends to his flock, the field of purple flowers at the end of the road lined with olive trees where the grandmother cuddles her pet sheep. Their life and that of their family consists of everyday rituals of an unusual calm, even if the Afro-Palestinian Bedouin couple lives in a tent pitched illegally on unused land where the countryside meets the fringes of Amman. Their son, his wife and their children in another tent right next door. The animals are tended to, the cramped living spaces organised, the children sent off to school. But the world outside keeps creeping in: the racist comments the girl hears from her classmates about her skin colour, the grandmother’s recollections of fleeing during the Nakba massacres which come to chime with the television reports from the West Bank and Gaza, the inevitable arrival of the bulldozers. Guided by her own family’s experience of displacement, Asmahan Bkerat follows the daily lives of the Najar family with infinite patience and empathy, creating a space of calm intimacy that makes the subsequent hardships which soon emerge all the more heart-wrenching. Linking the Palestinian struggle to questions of racism, gentrification and generational conflict, Bkerat’s first feature documentary is a work of extraordinary precision and confidence.

James Lattimer

Snow, seen for the first time, comes together with hard labour and homesickness. A Kosovo-Bangladeshi directorial duo offers a raw, immediate glimpse into the limbo of a group of Bangladeshi construction workers in Kosovo, building houses while stranded far from their own homes. In a foreign country itself plagued by economic migration, fragments of the workers’ lives emerge through footage shot on their mobile phones: family faces on the screen, dangerous heights at work and dreams of a better future. A quiet reclaiming of their humanity beyond exploitation and invisibility. For some, this is Europe, too…

Anca Păunescu

Jimena is in her twenties, a young woman who goes by the nickname La Pichi and grew up on the edge of Buenos Aires close to the port, the other side of the invisible line that separates centre from periphery. These are not mere descriptions, but rather how she tells it herself – her garrulousness knows no bounds, which makes her the perfect storyteller. Like a Scheherazade porteña, La Pichi tells a new story each night and there are so many it’s easy to lose count. With their extravagant titles, her stories of relationships, family, body issues and class might seem like tall tales, but they are all plucked from her everyday reality, the same reality lived on the fringes that we see in velvety nocturnal images during and in between her voiceover monologues, which are narrated with an infectious enthusiasm and humour that belies their ambivalent undercurrents: the tale of the boyfriend who didn’t want to be seen with her, the tale of the transvestite-loving grandmother who cooked glorious food she wasn’t supposed to eat, the tale of the father with vitiligo who at one point was no longer there. Yet this is no narrative of hardship and suffering, but rather one of irrepressible, inspirational joy, for what can be more empowering than being given space to chronicle your own biography on your own terms? As La Pichi herself says, “I wasn’t one word, I was many.”

James Lattimer